Evernote’s Photographic Memory

Evernote has some pretty significant OCR (optical character recognition) capabilities. What this means to you is you can take pictures of words, save them as notes in Evernote, and Evernote can read (and search) those words. Not only that, but Evernote can even read some handwriting (print, not cursive and realizing there’s some handwriting no one can read).

Okay, so how do you put this photographic memory to work in your research? The first step is to make sure you’ve got the Evernote app on your phone (iOS or Android). Now, use that app to capture photo notes. Some of the things to photograph include:

historical markers

headstones

documents

pages in books

handwritten notes

whiteboard information during meetings or classes

In addition to capturing the text of a photographed object, the Evernote app and your phone are also recording geolocation data. Add a few tags to better define each note’s contents and you have created a photographic memory of your research field trip.

Yes, there are limits to Evernote’s OCR capabilities. The quality of the photograph – and the object itself – will affect Evernote’s ability to recognize the text it contains. You can supplement Evernote’s OCR effort by including audio notes dictating the contents of the item you just captured in a photo note.

If you don’t have the Evernote app on your phone, get it now. It costs nothing but it’s value is priceless.